Sarah Park, M.D.

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National Advisory Committee on Children and Disasters Board Member

Dr. Park is the Hawaii State Epidemiologist and Chief of the Disease Outbreak Control Division, Hawaii Department of Health. In this capacity, she directs all activities related to emerging infections (e.g., Hawaii’s response to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, 2014 Ebola response), disease surveillance and investigations, and immunizations, as well as co-directs Hawaii’s Emergency Medical Services for Children program. Dr. Park has served on various national advisory boards, including the National Preparedness and Response Science Board, and professional society executive committees as well as participated in critical national working groups focusing on topics such as guidelines for pediatric anthrax vaccines and smallpox management, and current public health concerns such as the Zika virus. She has been an active member, especially in the areas of infectious diseases and surveillance, of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, the professional home of public health applied epidemiologists, and is the current President.

Dr. Park is a former Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where her work included activities in bacterial respiratory diseases, West Nile Virus, methicillin resistant and vancomycin resistant Staphylococcus aureus, and SARS. She has worked internationally with the World Health Organization and CDC in activities such as polio elimination, vaccine preventable disease surveillance and program assessment, and epidemic disease investigation and response.

Dr. Park completed her undergraduate education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, her medical education at the Boston University School of Medicine, her pediatrics residency at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford, and her pediatric infectious diseases fellowship at the University of California at San Francisco. She continues to practice clinically, occasionally covering the pediatric infectious diseases inpatient service at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women & Children in Honolulu, HI, and is an As- sistant Clinical Professor at the University of Hawaii John A. Burns School of Medicine.